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Jim Walls joined the California Highway Patrol in 1971, working in the Southern California community of Van Nuys. In 1984 he was injured in a shootout during an enforcement stop, and while on administrative leave met Sierra boss Ken Williams via his wife Donna, a hair stylist who would occasionally cut Williams’ hair in a salon in Oakhurst. Williams was mulling over the idea of a Sierra adventure game about police work, and was looking for a consultant with real-world experience.

Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel, 1987

Police Quest 2: The Vengeance, 1988

Police Quest 3: The Kindred, 1991

Working with Sierra, Walls would create the story for Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel, and go on to make two more games in the series, as well as the naval thriller Codename: Iceman, until leaving the company in 1991. His name would be replaced on the box by none less than former LAPD chief Daryl F. Gates in Police Quest: Open Season, released in 1993. That year Walls would consult for Tsunami Media, made up of mostly ex-Sierra people, producing Blue Force, another police procedural adventure game.

Blue Force by Tsunami, 1993

Subsequent to a couple of unsuccessful crowd-funding campaigns to launch a new IP in the vein of Police Quest titled Precinct, Walls settled into retirement. But his work on the Police Quest series, a beloved part of the Sierra adventure game pantheon, writes Jim Walls’ name into the books of video game history.

Gamasutra has a great article on how Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, creators of the venerable Space Quest adventure game series during the heydays of Sierra, managed to bury the hatchet and end a 20-year estrangement to work together on the new Kickstarter project that you can help fund. As always, you can read about the history of Space Quest and Sierra in our Dot Eaters article here.

Coming down the ether, otherwise known as Kotaku, comes word that The Two Guys From Andromeda, aka Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, are setting up shop to produce a new space-themed adventure game. They have a pretty good pedigree for this sort of thing, as they were the creators of the original Space Quest graphical adventure games for Sierra. The SQ games were truly hilarious, spiritual successors of the SF comedy Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books by Douglas Adams, and lampooning a wide spectrum of popular culture.

It’s especially surprising to see Murphy back in the game, so to speak, considering his little-hidden distaste for the industry that chewed him up and spit him out after the 6th and final Space Quest game, Roger Wilco inThe Spinal Frontier, released in 1995.

Details are sketchy at this point, but it does appear that things are pulling together, and the GuysFromAndromeda company is currently hiring talent. Whether or not the boys are putting together another Space Quest game or some other (ad)venture, one can be assured the laughter will be heard from one end of the galaxy to the other.